Ht./Wt./Age: The Glacial Regard

by Dennis Swanson
September, 2002 - May, 2003

Dennis Swanson

Dennis Swanson holds a master's degree in art and a master of fine arts degree from the Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa. He has served as a teaching assistant in the multimedia program and an associate performer in the Center for the New Performing Arts (funded by a Rockefeller Grant) at the University of Iowa. He has also taught at Iowa State University. His work has appeared in several venues, including the Cedar Rapids Art Center, the Rockford Museum of Art, the Davenport Art Center, and the Annual Iowa Artist Show at the Des Moines Art Center. He lives and works in an award-winning, passive-solar home that he designed and built near Ames, Iowa.

Artist's Statement

"Neither of these pieces is an art object. They are 'lenses' for viewing the natural world. The granite boulder by itself takes precedent from Breton's Sunday afternoon walks with this party of conscripted Surrealists, gathering found objects of special merit. This aesthetic activity of observation and selection extends backward in time; the purposes blur. Beginning with physical specification viewed through a human filter, the texts focus outward, from descriptive science, geology, towards simile. On the hilltop, the 'carried' image is framed by erratica marginalia. The subject of the two pieces settles somewhere between them, on their difference: 2D/3D, manmade/natural, the original/its copy, the event/the document, the hidden/the revealed, the buried/the unearthed, and finally, presence and absence, inflection or innuendo, 'The blackbird whistling/Or just after.'"

-Dennis Swanson

Galleries maintained by Kate Elliott. Page last updated on 29 November 2017.